Black Mirror’s foreshadowing is petrifying
It’s no surprise that AI has been a growing topic over the past several months, especially considering Google Trends has reported that “Artificial Intelligence” search spiked up to 53% in December of 2022, and the number of searches have increased excessively ever since. If you’re someone that’s consistently online, softwares like ChatGPT, AI music and photo generators are currently some of the hottest topics on social media. Many use ChatGPT to receive an answer to a question they have and several use AI music generators to generate a cover of their favorite song sung by a different musician by their favorite artist.
As of lately, many celebrities like Kendall Jenner, Tom Brady and Paris Hilton have signed away their likeliness to Meta. This means Meta has been permitted permission to use their face and voice however they would like to on their platforms.
Since late September of this year, Meta has generated AI accounts like “yoursisbillie” (likeliness of Kendall Jenner), “amberthedetective” (likeliness of Paris Hilton) and “gameonbru” (likeliness of Tom Brady) on Instagram. Many have had different reactions online and for the most part, they’re not great. Several users have expressed how disturbing and strange these accounts are.
‘It’s like they’re trying to create parasocial relationships with AI,’ someone shared.
‘People are going to fall in love with these things,’ a user joked.
Countless others made comments referencing how eerily striking this is to one specific episode of the Netflix show, Black Mirror.
These comments are referencing Season 6, Episode 1 of Black Mirror: Joan Is Awful. This episode stars Salma Hayek, who plays herself and Annie Murphy, who plays Joan, a CEO at a tech company.
The beginning of the episode starts with Joan driving to work (she fires an employee of hers that day), then transitioning to a session with her shrink (she misses her ex), afterwards meets up with her ex for a surreptitious dinner (they kiss) and later Joan arriving home to her boyfriend (they’re in for a surprise and not a great one). When Joan and her boyfriend, Krish, settle down for the night and begin searching for a show to watch on Streamberry, they come across the show, Joan is Awful, characterized by a CGI-based Salma Hayek who signed away her likeliness.
As they are watching the show, Joan realizes that everything she did that day is appearing on screen (like discussing with her therapist how tedious Krish is and making out with her ex) and well, let’s just say that night didn’t end well for Joan. Later in this episode, she finds out that she didn’t read the fine print thoroughly while signing Streamberry’s terms and conditions, so her data from her devices were used for the storyline of Joan Is Awful, rightfully so.
If there are two things I learned from this, it’s that I’ll stop scrolling past the terms and conditions page and the future is happening now as we speak.